Alaska’s Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Wednesday night he’s ordering an investigation into Democrat Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign, hours after President Donald Trump demanded she be thrown off the ballot and prosecuted.
The uproar follows a New York Times report detailing how senior advisers to Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee helped recruit a retiree named Dan J. Sullivan, who shares a name with the Republican incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, and the newspaper reported the governor has ordered a probe of that matter days before the election.
“They said they didn’t do it, and they did do it, and they got caught,” Trump told reporters on his way to an Ohio rally, branding the effort “voter fraud at the highest level.”
Dunleavy echoed him on X. “Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” he wrote.
Proving a crime may be another matter. Asked on Fox News whether the scheme was illegal, Attorney General Todd Blanche replied, “It should be!” Earlier this year, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that nothing in state law or the Constitution allowed it to judge a candidate’s motives.
The Justice Department’s own lawsuit, filed last week at Trump’s direction, asks that the race not be certified if Sullivan loses. It doesn’t allege specific illegal activity, but Chief U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason fast-tracked the case and noted that the administration waited to sue until Alaskans “had already begun casting their ballots.”
Democrats were quick to point out that Republicans have run the same playbook. A spokeswoman for Senate Majority PAC highlighted a GOP-linked super PAC that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in Alaska propping up Democratic and Green Party candidates in this year’s primary.
“The reality is that while it’s maybe an interesting story, this sort of thing is not really new,” Democratic strategist Chris Meagher wrote.
Peltola waved off the controversy as “just another distraction.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who backed Peltola in past races but supports Sullivan this year, called it “a pattern of lies and coverups and a culture of deception.”
Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall, who designed Alaska’s ranked-choice system, said that system could limit the confusion. Republicans who rank both Sullivans will likely see their votes end up with the incumbent.
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